positive thinker // sun worshipper // champagne enthusiast

The Beginning of Spring Break: Wellington & Picton

If you’re reading this, it means I’ve finally found enough motivation to actually go through the pictures from my trip instead of watching movies in bed and eating the rest of my Easter candy. These important things have taken priority over posting about my trip. Sorry bout it.

As you may already know, I spent the last 2 and a half weeks exploring the South Island of New Zealand while carrying 7k of my life on my back. Since 18 days is a lot to cover in one post, I’m going to break it up by location. So today I’ll start at the beginning.

Our trip was supposed to start with a bus ride from Palmy to Wellington at 5:30 am. I say supposed to start because our bus never showed up. We waited for over an hour at the bus stop, but Nakedbus just chose to blow us off. Rude. Fortunately, we were able to catch a ride to Wellington with our sweetest friend Mel and still make our ferry to the South Island that night! We got into Wellington around 1pm, but our ferry wasn’t until 6, so we took some time to wander around the city. We went to Te Papa, which is a huge (and free!) museum right on the waterfront of Wellington where we saw a dead giant squid and some freaky ogre statues, among other things.

The outside of Te PapaThe Wellington HarborLearning about Maori historyI literally can’t think of any words that could possibly add anything to this picture…

I had heard that Wellington was supposed to be the “San Francisco of New Zealand”, which sort of made sense, but not really. It was right on the bay, but that was essentially the only similarity I saw. But I was there for all of 4 hours, so what do I know?

After a few hours, it was time to board the ferry. We were crossing the water right as the sun was setting, so of course we had a photo shoot.

Just a little bit windy…

Once we arrived in Picton and got kicked out of a public park for trying to camp, we walked about 5k to reach our campsite. Actually, we walked about 3k and decided to try to hitch a ride for the rest of the way there. In New Zealand, it’s actually really normal and safe to hitchhike, but this will definitely not be one of the cultural aspects I bring home with me. We were picked up by a friendly German girl who offered to pick us up in the morning and bring us back into town in time for our bus. Once we reached the campsite, I brushed my teeth, ate a banana (in that order), and settled into my sleeping bag for our first night of camping.

I was very, very skeptical about the camping aspect of our trip since I absolutely hate am not a huge fan of camping. But it actually wasn’t as bad as I was expecting! (And by that I mean I didn’t want to kill myself the whole time, just most of the time.)

Our new German friend dropped us off in town around 8:30 the next morning. We lucked out by finding a beach and a farmer’s market right by our bus stop, so we had no problem killing a few hours before heading off to Nelson. (Side note: I always feel guilty when I go to farmer’s markets here because I have no intention of buying anything, but I still sample something from every. single. booth.)

We were also approached by a (very possibly homeless) drunk man, and given this nice French book. He shook all of our hands. This proves I am better at making friends than I thought.

That’s all I have for ya! I realize this was a really boring post, but I don’t have the energy to a) write more or b) attempt to throw jokes in somewhere, so instead I’ll just promise to make the next post better.